Consumer Interface for Real-Time Electrical Demand Changing the way we use electricity
Geneviève de Mijolla ‘13 and Professor Judith Cardell Smith College
Integrate an extensive set of sensors, as well as various control and communication methods, in order to monitor, protect, and optimize the delivery of electricity, both at the transmission and distribution levels
Enable two-way communication between generators and consumers
Improved operational efficiency
Economic, environmental, and reliability advantages
Allow for demand response programs to not only be more effective, but also more widespread: smart grids have the potential to involve consumers in a way that the current grid does not.
I would like to acknowledge Professor Judith Cardell, Professor Paul Voss, Aaron Cantrell, Dale Renfrow, Eric Jensen, and Gregory Young for their contributions to this project. Figure 3: Physical Interface
Figure 5: Website Interface
Physical Interface Main advantages of the website interface:
The information on it is available from anywhere
Historical information is available through this display
A comparison of a user’s energy consumption to that of other buildings is provided through this display
Smart Grids Website Interface
Objectives of this study Future Work
Acknowledgements
Main advantages of the physical interface:
More attention-grabbing than other display forms
More intuitive to use, and thus more engaging for the whole family
Especially effective when convincing less motivated customers to change the way they view and use electricity
To draw interest to power issues.
To provide information to users about the current grid status and their electricity consumption
To empower consumers to be make informed decisions about their electricity use
Testing these displays by:
Recording consumers’ impressions and feedback on the design
Comparing the electrical load of residences using these displays to their previous electrical load to get an idea of their capacity to reduce electricity consumption during peak demand hours
Figure 1: Power Infrastructure
Figure 2: Flowchart illustrating the displaying of data for the physical interface
Figure 4: Flowchart illustrating the displaying of real-time data for the website interface